


until the very end

by Dialux



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Magic, Pureblood Culture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-16
Updated: 2016-12-16
Packaged: 2018-09-09 00:18:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8868634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dialux/pseuds/Dialux
Summary: Surviving avada kedavra requires sacrifice; and Lily Evans was never the only person to know this.





	

**** There is an old song in an old city in India.

_ Kali runs wild,  _ sings a grandmother;  _ she loves too hard for this world, and in the end it kills her. _

_ How?  _ Her grandson asks, once, sweat-stained and tanned. 

The grandmother presses a cool hand to his forehead, red-dark hair sliding over her eyes.  _ She loved a boy who loved her back,  _ she says.  _ She loved him, but he was the son of her father’s killers. Her brothers wished to kill him for defiling what they thought was theirs. They ran after him, and Kali slipped in the mud as she raced them to the village, and as lightning sang down from the sky she threw herself over him, trusting her brothers wouldn’t hurt her. _

The boy frowns.  _ Was it enough? _

_ No,  _ answers the grandmother.  _ Kali died, under her brothers’ lightning curses. But as the sun rose, it revealed that her lover survived, a scar across his jaw where she’d kissed him last, in the same shape as the lightning curses her brothers flung at him. See,  _ bangara _ : Kali saved him. Her love was his shield. _

The door rattles, and a man enters. His face softens as he looks at the boy, seated at his grandmother’s knee.  _ Telling stories?  _ He asks.

_ Yes,  _ chatters the boy.  _ About Kali and the lightning curses. _

The grandmother watches them, and she nods. 

_ Yes,  _ she says.  _ The old romances. _

…

(In the oldest stories, all lightning is shaded green.)

…

A small tribe lives by the banks of a river they name  _ Life-bringer.  _ They worship many gods; among the porcelain deities lovingly cleaned and painted at the shrine, there is one of a dark-haired man. It is the only one to be of a human.

Others come and ask, curious, wondering:  _ who is this man? _

_ There was a king,  _ answers the village elders.  _ He wished for our land, and so he sent his men after us. We were farmers, but our lives are worth more than his gold: we would die, we knew, but we took up our wands as needed. _

_ And as we stood in front of a group of the king’s best soldiers,  _ another elder continues,  _ we waited to die. But a man stepped forwards, and he had hair black as a raven’s wing, eyes even darker.  _

The last elder smiles, her rheumatic eyes milky.  _ He opened his arms wide, and his heart even wider, and with it he gave us a protection that all the king’s men could not deny. And so they left, and have left us be ever since. _

…

Narcissa Malfoy once wore a gown of brilliant red, hair braided around the crown of her head and a coronet of gold and rubies resting on it.

_ Like Mariana Black,  _ the others whisper, and she revels in their jealousy, in Lucius’ dark-eyed gaze, in her parents’ pride.  _ Like the woman who watched her family’s slaughter when she was but a girl, like the woman who crowned herself queen of Brittany in the time-before-time. _

(There are old tapestries in the attics of Malfoy Manor. Narcissa runs through them, one day, years later, discarding the moth-worn and ruined. She unfolds one, and the brilliant colors spill across her lap; there has been no lack of protective spells on this cloth.

A woman stands, head bent forwards, golden hair braided around a crown of unyielding stone. Narcissa frowns, tugging it closer, and studies Mariana Black’s arms.

The sleeves are slashed away, the ends of the cloth trailing to the ground, vivid as blood. Cutting across one pale forearm, knotted and ugly, is a scar the shape of lightning.)

…

Once, there was a great man.

He became a leader in a time of war; acquitted himself well; drew a thousand accolades. People knelt before him and asked him to bless their children. And as the years went on, the man’s ideas became reality, his beliefs fact.

To this day, he is named a hero.

(Tell me, do you know how many things he left burning in his wake? This is how the world becomes a little darker, inch by creeping inch. And when the shining spotlights have dimmed, all one sees is wreckage.)

This is how ideas disappear: not slowly, but all at once.

…

According to a tribe at the foothills of a place that would, centuries later, be named the Black Hills, lightning lent power and speed to a warrior. It was painted on their faces, as war paint. Even today, the duels done for honor or love in these tribes are wandless; they smear red paint across their cheekbones and buckle down to fight.

Every time, they paint a jagged set of arches at the hinge of the jaw. 

You see: lightning represents honor, and strength. 

You see: the mark of death is the mark of lightning.

…

“Not Harry!” A woman screams, body twisting, red-blood strands falling. “Please... have mercy... have mercy... Not Harry!  _ Not Harry! _ Please- I'll do anything!”

The woman falls, her life taken in a flash of green; but the boy she protects does not.

…

A princess once died in a tower.

The villagers talk about the flash of green that lit the sky bright enough to make them fear the apocalypse. They talk about a tower that never existed before, only appearing when the sky fractured and bled green, a tower that only ever existed as a set of ruins. 

They find the body of a woman, draped in cloth finer than most of them will ever see. They take her jewels but leave her gown, and bury her quietly. 

_ She must’ve been a princess,  _ one of the villagers observes, at the cemetery.  _ Looked fine enough for it. _

A week later, a man enters the town, nothing remarkable about him but his green eyes, height, and scar, running down the side of his neck.

_ I heard about a tower,  _ he says. 

_ Yes,  _ those who don’t slam their doors in his face say, cautiously.  _ Beyond the second tree, turn left. _

_ Did you-  _ the man swallows, holding his hat in his hands.  _ Did you find a woman? Comes up to my shoulder, hair dark as the sky, skin white as snow. _

Only one man answers him.  _ Yes. We buried her. _

_ Take me to her,  _ says the man. After a pause-  _ Please. _

At her grave, he kneels, rubbing long fingers against her headstone. He doesn’t look up at the man who accompanied him to the graveyard.

_ She hated me,  _ he whispers. _ I should have- I should have loved her more. But I didn’t. There are those who imprisoned me, and in the end she just… she saved me.  _ He fingers the scar at his neck.  _ She came for me after I ruined her, and when my prisoners tried to kill me, she threw herself on top of me. _

_ That isn’t hate,  _ says the villager. 

The man looks up, green eyes glittering.  _ She wished me to stay alive of hate. She wished me to stay alive in a world without her, and the only reason for that is hatred.  _ He sighs.  _ I would take her bones with me now to my home, but better she lie here. Better she lie with the people she so loved, isn’t it? Anyhow, she was never mine. _

Hours later, the villager bids the man goodbye.

_ What ought I name you, stranger?  _ He asks. The man almost turns away, but the villager continues:  _ I’ve given you an evening. ‘Tis only courteous. _

_ Salazar,  _ says the man, then, jamming his hat on his head, grief lining the narrow slope of his shoulders.  _ Call me Salazar. _

…

Move forwards a hundred years, three hundred, a thousand: Harry Potter is nothing more than a legend. He is a story to tell the younger children, of a better time- a time when love was enough to overcome death.

…

This is a history.

This is a story of loss, of gain, of a hundred chances taken, a hundred chances repaid. This is people stepping forwards, this is people accepting, this is people fighting. This is a life taken, a life given, a balance struck; this is a magic that runs deeper than wandlore and runes. This is a story- this is a  _history-_ of those who sacrificed, of those who accepted that sacrifice.

You see: Lily Evans was never the only person to shield against _avada kedavra._


End file.
